...fifty pounds each didn't seem to help with the cornering, so I went back a few hours later and told him I wanted to try seventy-five. He shook his head nervously. "Not me," he said, handing me the air-hose. Here. They're your tires, you do it."

"What's wrong?" I asked. "You think they can't take seventy-five?"

He nodded, moving away as I stooped to deal with the left front. "You're damn right," he said. "Those tires want twenty-eight in the front and thirty-two in the rear. Fifty's dangerous, but seventy-five is crazy. They'll explode!"

"I told you," I said, "Sandoz laboratories designed those tires. They're special. I could load them up to a hundred."

"God almighty!" he groaned. "Don't do that here."

"Not today," I replied, "I want to see how they corner at seventy-five."

He chuckled. "You won't even get to the corner, Mister."

"We'll see," I said, moving around to the rear with the air-hose. In truth, I was nervous. The two front ones were tighter than snare-drums; they felt like teak wood when I tapped on them with the rod. But what the hell? I thought. If they explode, so what? It's not often a man gets a chance to run terminal experiments on a virgin Cadillac and four brand-new $80 tires.

--Hunter S Thompson, 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas', 1971

Yeah, I appreciate that but I think you may have missed something in my post. I know exactly why they've done what they did and for the majority of cases it's a very good idea. But if you want to play the game in its original format, you are SOL.

Right now, you buy a game - you get a choice of downloading a Windows version or a Mac version. Would it have killed them to have had a third option to download the DOS version of the game? It would be a damn sight smaller than the bloaty thing I had to download.

I think what really pissed me off was the fact that they had deleted the original EXE files instead of just leaving them around for people who needed them.

This. I bought the Kyrandia series about a month ago, and after faffing around with WINE to extract the games - which was not fun because it only drew half the installer and I had to guess what it was trying to tell me - I found that they didn't actually include the bloody game program at all, just the data files and a scummvm installation of unknown provenance.

Yes, it does make it easier for someone without a DOS background to get the games up and running, I can't fault them for that. But I would much preferred to have had the option to get just the bare installation files so that I could play the actual game on the platform of my choosing. After all, I had assumed I was buying the original game, rather than some weird, dicked-about version of it :P

You'd better believe it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Because it needs to compress and decompress things.

The kernel image is usually compressed anyway, then you've got things like page compression for zram, in-filesystem compression support - heck, BTRFS uses LZO! I think some network layer stuff like PPP supports header compression, and all that's only the things I'm vaguely aware of.

If you travel far enough to the left or to the right, you end up in the same place.

Certainly they were - the old Blackberry OS was FIPS-certified. At the time, about 3 years ago, it was the only phone platform we could find that matched the government security requirements the company I worked for needed for a tender, and that was unfortunate, because the old OS is shit and horrific to program against.

I do not know if the QNX-based OS was ever secured as tightly as OS7.

How about SM911? It's bias-compatible.

Never heard of 'In Watermelon Sugar' before. It was weirdly beautiful.

That was sufficiently weird that I had to look it up: http://www.livescience.com/386...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...

If the drive is powered down, I wouldn't bet on it lasting the year. Intel only seem to guarantee up to 3 months without power for their drives: http://www.intel.co.uk/content...

Note also that the retention is said to go downwards as P/E cycles are used up. For me, I think they make great system drives, but I don't use them for anything precious.

Replaying Morrowind at the moment. The plot and the worldbuilding in that is really what makes it for me. Not least the religious texts about Vivec... mind-bogglingly bizarre yet seemingly strung together with some otherworldly logic of their own.

System Shock 1 I found to be quite well-thought out too. It would have worked without the plot and background, and indeed there was even an option to turn it off. But without the text or audio logs strewn about depicting the fall of the station in poignant detail, it wouldn't have been nearly as memorable.

I believe these were marketed as 'Guild' or something in the US. Mine came off ebay about a decade ago and appears to be one of the first all-transistor models, cira 1966 or so. I believe it's the oldest piece of equipment that I use regularly - I also have an Akai 210GX which I use occasionally.
Most of my studio equipment is from the late 1980s or early-mid 1990s, when open-reel technology had reached its peak (microprocessor control, built-in DBX noise reduction etc).

I'm not sure you can actually get Lion anymore. I waited too long on Snow Leopard, and once Mountain Lion came out, that was the only upgrade offered, despite the fact it wouldn't run on the 2007 hardware. I bit the bullet and upgraded the hardware. I also considered ditching it at that point, but there are still a couple of pieces of software I need OSX for with no Linux equivalent and the win32 port doesn't run in WINE.